Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series)

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “How much do you weigh now?”

  “A lot,” said Ian. “Forty-three pounds.”

  “Well, that’s too much for this old horse to jump a fence with.”

  “We did it yesterday. Giddyap.”

  “But yesterday you weren’t all wet. That makes it heavier. You’ve got to add the water,” Judah said.

  He pressed his son’s knees to his ears. He heard only Ian’s burbling instructions, felt only the self-willed warm extension of his flesh. “That one,” yelled Ian. “Get the ram!”

  “Horned Dorsets,” Judah instructed his son. “Those bigger one are Suffolk. The most of them is culls.”

  “We’ll get them at the pass.”

  “What pass?”

  “The gate,” said Ian. “Up ahead. That’s where we’ll head them off.”

  “Not this horse.”

  “Giddyap.”

  “You’re not checkreining. You haven’t given me signals.”

  Ian pummeled at him and he veered left. For all his gruff disclaiming, Judah felt the victor when he lost.

  Now he sits in the kitchen’s deep dark, having placed himself precisely in the center of the space between the sink and table. He knows the room’s coordinates. He is at the apex of a triangle with the cutting board and faucet at the base; Judah tucks in his arms. He follows his nose. He is someone sitting, he assures himself, in the middle of the kitchen that is the middle of the downstairs wing in the middle of the house.

  His chair is painted white. It has three slats in the back. It has a solid seat, and the legs have been squared off. There are three additional chairs drawn up to the table’s three sides; Judah bisects the chair that had been opposite his. He draws the line from that apex (where Harriet had used to sit, and splits her down the center, imagining her intestines and esophagus coiled around the perpendicular bisector that makes of man a mirror) and connects those two legs across the table’s plane, and has an isosceles triangle similar to that which his chair fashions with the far legs of the flanking chairs. Except he himself has moved. The room will not stay vacant. No matter how hard Judah stares at the wall as though it were Euclidean, he sees his parents backed against it, wearing evening clothes. They are gesturing and fretful in the middle of some argument he cannot hear, but feels himself involved in. It is summer since the screens are in, and he hears the june bugs clattering against them. His father had his arms upraised; his mother was not cowering but shrinks from him, is wearing silk, and the rustle of her dress is like the rustle of the june bugs on the screens. Then Judah sees himself with Maggie on the cutting counter, watching her reflection in the kitchen window as she bounces above him and jiggles. He balances on his toes. “We’d best not wake the boy,” he says. She makes appreciative noises although he covers her mouth.

  Therefore he does his roots. The square root of four is two, and the square root of two hundred and fifty-six is sixteen. The square root of one is one, but the square root of minus one is an imaginary number, i.

  Ian was a real result and Seth an imagined result; they multiplied an “i” by “i” and got minus one. “Don’t talk arithmetic to me,” said Hattie when he tried to explain. “There’s no such thing as making a mistake with roots. Square roots indeed. You water children and feed and love them and they grow; our family tree, Judah, is as long as anybody’s in America. Don’t ever be ashamed of that.”

  “I’m not.”

  “There’s glory in it,” she said. “It’s no disadvantage to know your own roots.”

  The root of nine is three, and three has a fractional root; the root of eighty-one is nine, and nine squared is eighty-one; things fit. He can imagine apples doubling and contracting and being bushel after bushel and then stacked crates. The world is a warehouse of numbers, and if you keep close enough track you’d know where everything is stored and when it had been put there and labeled and how it stood with reference to everything about it. There are no memories, no panting wives or generations scrabbling at the edges of composure like june bugs at screens. Maggie played cat’s cradle for him, and he watched the intricate interlocked twining; there were patterns she could twist and fatten or reverse and then she’d flick her fingers at him and there’d be only string.

  As the years went on, however, Ian lost his interest in games played on the farm. The boy was studious. Judah read him Peacock’s letters and he liked them well enough but said that history had passed the old man by.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You know the frontier thesis,” Ian said.

  Judah waited.

  “Frederick Jackson Turner says you have to keep on going if there’s wilderness in front of you.”

  “What of it?”

  “That’s what makes America. That’s why we’re so busy moving all the time.”

  They were in the study. Ian had his Hammond Atlas and a sheet of copy paper and was making maps.

  “I follow,” Judah said.

  “Well, the way Mom sees it, Peacock got to the Pacific but he had to turn around. He should have stayed there, maybe.”

  “Is that how she sees it?”

  “Yes. Then we could all be California people. It’s an improvement, Mom says, it’s the Gateway to the Orient, and warm.”

  “Your mother talks that way to you?”

  Ian drew the Mississippi, using blue. He made the delta just above the gulf and put a big black spot at Hannibal, the birthplace of Mark Twain.

  “She says that Peacock’s partner, Colonel Frémont, was a brave man with men’s lives as long as they weren’t his own. She says that General is just another word for coward, and we won the west by genocide.”

  “By what?”

  “By genocide. What’s that mean?” Ian asked.

  “It’s when you kill off everyone. But there’s people left in California.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Ian. He crosshatched the Texas panhandle and Oklahoma in red.

  When Ian learned to paint, Maggie bought him easels and sketch pads and a box full of oil tubes and brushes. Then Judah set a gallon can of Barn Red beside them and asked which was likely to last.

  “That’s not the question, is it? Look at this sunset, darling.”

  “Look at this barn,” Judah said.

  But more and more, as the years passed, he set out alone. He took the pickup or a tractor to the bottom land and saw his fields splay out, untenanted. He watched his son, come back from school, practicing lay-ups at the basket he had rigged behind the sugarhouse for twenty minutes only, then practicing the piano for two hours every afternoon. It grew dark while he played.

  “Aren’t you proud of him, Jude?” Maggie asked.

  “Why?”

  “Listen to that. Grieg. It took me years to learn just the first movement. He’ll play it in the school recital Thursday.”

  “What time is that?”

  “What time will that be, Ian?”

  He looked up at her from where he sat on the piano bench. He used no music.

  “Three o’clock,” said Ian and commenced the phrase again. Maggie bent above him, nodding, tapping her foot and wiggling her fingers in time, and Judah—watching from his leather chair beside the fireplace—saw that his son’s eyes were closed.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Maggie.

  Ian continued.

  “Sixteenth notes,” she explained to Judah. “Every one of them clear as a bell.”

  “They’re muddy.” Ian said.

  At two o’clock that Thursday, Judah got stuck in the Shed field. He had been seeding alfalfa, and turning on the western slope he sunk his right rear wheel. He tried rocking free, then led his length of chain around a locust tree and pulled. The tractor stalled. It settled. He had one pass left to make and took his work coat off and tied the sleeves around his neck. He filled this sack with alfalfa and completed the seeding by hand.

  “Let the buildings be laid out,” Peacock had commanded, “in the Shape and Memory of our Savior’s ransom, with the four
points of the compass being the four of the Cross. Let the barns be due west of the house, pointing as His strong arm pointed to where I scribe these lines. Let the Carriages and suchlike be stored on the easterly Axis. South at a suitable distance, where his feet were nailed, you may build in whatsoever fashion but not above one story’s heighth, the farmer’s house. Thus even to the eagle’s eye, and surely to him who stands on the Cupola, will we furnish instruction. Somehow I seem to see the Holy Spirit hovering, in the bird-guise he assumes wherewith in safety he may visit this nether pit, and to avoid a suchlike crucifixion—for what are the yearly migrations but testimonial also to the Flock’s disgust? And do not greylag geese example this search, scanning the Compass-points for some clear sign that our Redeemer prospers—espying the Reverent arrangement of our Severall buildings, and reporting to the august Captain that in this township anyhow there thrives one Honest man!”

  The order in the house assures him. He knows what each closet contains. He knows the way the servants’ stairwell curls around the dumbwaiter and laundry chute, and how the elevator shaft takes up the southeast corner of what had been the ballroom. He knows the hall’s dimensions, and that it takes seventy-two steps descending from the room she used to sleep in. There are plaster ornaments Judah can trace, eyes shut, and he distinguishes the feel of the oak fireplace from those that are sided in walnut; he knows who bought the billiard table for the billiard room.

  The difference between four and fourteen, he knows, can be ten or the first integer or he can multiply by three and then add two or subtract two from the square of four; they’re all of them fourteen. And it had been the same with steamer trunks or women’s protestations and the jobs he held then quit. Within the seeming random sets there was always this arcane rigidity—always his own sense of system and logic and the exact opposition of loss to gain. From one to two, Judah knows, you either add one or double the original number; you also multiply by seven and then subtract five.

  Yet these rooms contain no series he can plumb. Nor did his age and illness seem sequential to his block-hard rock-thick middle age. Nor is Maggie’s disappearance and return and disappearance a series; you go from one to four to one to six to one to eight to one, and someone on a contrapuntal series thinks you’ve never left. He was running home mud-crusted, with the taste of metal in his throat. He was hiding in the laundry room behind the wicker baskets, staring at the shapeless, starched gray uniforms of maids. He was chewing on a syrup stick, his hands full of beet sugar, and he added water to it until it was a paste. He shuts his eyes and focuses and creates color: red and yellow and the sun’s orange arrangement. He wills it, this one dawn, to turn as he turns, motionless, and slip around the world the way a sleeve might on a scrawny pointing arm. He opens his eyes and is gratified: flame comes from the west.

  Fire: he sees her also as flame, though this is more his element, and of the four he’d qualify for earth and fire, she for air and water (he knows this; they have worked it out in the game called “Essences”: “What animal is Jo-jo,” she would ask. “What time of day?” And he’d answer “Skunk,” or “Three o’clock in the morning,” and she’d swat at him and grin and say “Raccoon. Early evening.” Then he’d ask, “What color is Hattie? What scent?” And she’d answer, “Mauve. The smell of pressed lilacs,” and he’d say “Green, because you ate my second piece of apple pie . . .”), but still he sees her firelit, her face become a kind of screen with shadowplay, that hair of hers alight (“Enclosed air spaces,” he would say, “it’s the secret of flame. And build it back up tepee style, and far enough back there to catch the draft.” “Why are you telling me this?” she would ask. “Because,” he’d say, “although I hope not, there may come a time when you need to make a fire and I’m not here to build it. Check the flues.” “You’re always here to build it,” Maggie said. She mock-shivered, then stretched. “You’re my heat source, husband . . .”)—so flame was domesticated for her, a source of comfort not terror, and he thinks of her always as “toasty,” which also was her word, or bending to the match flare with which she’d light her cigarette, or standing by the chunk stove with her hands out, fingers spread. He gave her a rotisserie one Christmas, and she used it often, so he’d stand in the kitchen watching while she trussed the chickens up, or ducks, and pricked them with her long-handled fork and added seasoning, then skewered them with what he could only call relish, ramming through. While the bird was turning they would watch it sweat and pucker and his wife would say, “That’s it. That’s heaven. Name every pleasure and the chicken has or is it now”—the fat igniting underneath the broiler coils, and liquid sizzling that would later coalesce. If they had an argument it was how she hated winter (and it was true, he came to acknowledge, that their first three meetings had been in the summertime, that she maybe thought Vermont a place of green abundance, not mud and granite and ice): fire her servitor somehow, so that she’d have only to breathe on the last white ash heap of the last set of embers on some abandoned hearth to kindle the household again, to set the stewpot bubbling and the ice-stiff clothes to dry . . .

  “We’ll walk the lines.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. You ought to know them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s important. A person should know what they live on.”

  “I’m hungry,” Ian said.

  “We’ll take something. We’ll bring yogurt with us.”

  “I hate yogurt.”

  “Pretzels then.”

  “Why can’t we just eat it here?” asked Ian. “Why do they have to get all soggy?”

  “Come on. We’re wasting time.”

  “My ankle hurts.”

  “Come on, I said.”

  “It hurts me. Mom said I shouldn’t stand on it.”

  “I’ll take you part way pickaback.”

  “I know the lines already,” Ian said.

  “Not the part we’re going to. Not north.”

  “I do so.”

  “OK,” Judah bent. “No more discussions. Not another word from you, hear?”

  “But I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll get us the pretzels and Coke.”

  “Can we check traps?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I take my .22?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Can I? Promise?”

  “Yes. I thought we said no more discussions.”

  “Promise double-promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s muddy out there,” Ian said. “I hate those boots.”

  “The hell with it, I’ll go alone. You stay.”

  “Well you might ask,” wrote Peacock, “why I promote this Residence and what purports its Excellence of size. As well ask the midge in the evening wherefore he Elects to bite. As well inquire of the leaping Salmon why it should scale Rock!”

  When Ian sprained his ankle jumping from the Toy House roof, Judah had been jumping with him, and he took the blame. “Thirty-two feet per second,” he said. “It’s true all right. We timed it.”

  “Are you hurt bad?” Maggie asked.

  “Of course not,” Judah said. “The shingles just broke loose is all.”

  “Tell me where it hurts you.”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Let the boy answer, OK? Let him say so for himself.”

  He had carried Ian to the house. He laid him on the daybed by the porch and put a blanket over him and then called Maggie. She came running. “What happened?”

  “We were doing roofing. Look, his toes move. Ian, wiggle them at your mother so she’ll know there’s nothing broke.”

  Ian spread his toes. Then he raised and lowered them while the face he had built for his father came undone: his lips jutted out, the skin around his eyes bunched up and wrinkled and his nose went white.

  “Don’t cry.”

  “He isn’t crying.”

  “He can if he wants to.”

  “Who’s stopping him?
”

  “I want some chocolate,” Ian said.

  “I’ll get that,” Judah said.

  But in the pantry, hunting chocolate, he could hear his son’s high wailing two rooms over and across the porch. There was a row of soup cans and chickpeas and tuna fish in front of him; he put his hand at the edge of the shelf and swept it, right to left.

  Wind: he thinks of her also in that; always there are breezes where she walks, and he thinks she could float if she stretched her arms out far enough and let hair billow on the updraft, a flaxen parachute to let her down securely wherever she might land. Judah thinks her the air’s consort, easy with airplanes and landing and what they call jet lag. It was always windy when they played at badminton, and though he said it was stupid, a grown man batting at a bit of fluff with feathers on it, swatting at nothing with wood and catgut that weighed next to nothing, no heft to it or solidity, she made him play and skipped happy circles around his aggrieved opposition, contesting his service and forehand assault, not ever sweating though she jig-stepped all over the court while he stood planted, immobile, in the court’s dead center, stamping the grass into mud. Using wrist flicks that he barely saw and a scampering grace that caused him to teeter from frustration to envy to desire, winning always, she defeated him with the wind at her back or in her face or coming at them sideways, gusting. There was the created wind they rode or drove in, with the windows open, and the winter’s continual probing, ice fingers fisting down chimneys or where they hadn’t caulked or through the storm-window sash, under doors. Air is what nobody does without; air is what you needn’t notice till it goes bad or stale. Next he remembers fire drills with Maggie and Ian, so they’d know how to blanket flame and close off all air sources and where he stored the plywood to cover up the fireplace if there were chimney fires, and how to keep low under the heat and, more important, the smoke, how to crawl not for the nearest exit necessarily but the smartest, how to take short breaths and hold them, how to follow his two golden rules, Keep your head, and Keep your head down. So Judah follows those instructions, keeping his own head and keeping it down and exits where he entered through the kitchen door. Air is something that you watch at sunset maybe, or when it’s coming on rain and there’s a field to load yet, reminding him of when he’d burned the bottom land by accident, and how it smelled: they had a brush fire going, trusting to the windless March day’s wetness, and there were only embers when he broke for lunch—returning to the Big House and taking his ease, sitting in the kitchen’s warmth and washing with relish and putting so much sugar in his coffee that the spoon got sluggish, going back at noon to hear the whole field crackling and the ground already crepitant, but there were marshy spots and snow at the field’s edge and what wind there was stayed southerly, herding the small flames to water. So he’d not been overworried and stood watching the bottom land gutter, smelling what he smells again now, and the field indeed sprouted greenly in April and gave a thick first cutting by June, and they took three cuttings off it that summer and by September he was claiming to have set the blaze on purpose. Air’s inconsequential until you need it for fire or to let the liquid out of cans or just to put some sort of God above this earth.